alt Hacker NewsI, respectfully, disagree with this analysis.
Prototyping platforms have tiny markets, but lead to downstream sales. Many a company were brought down by more developer-friendly platforms ignoring the "tiny" userbase of people who want to do unconventional things.
Most IC vendors provide free samples and support because of this. That's a market size of close to zero -- electronic engineers -- but leads to a market size of "massive." I can get an application engineer to visit my office for free to help me develop if I want.
Arguably, iPhone and Android won by supporting the tiny market of developers, who went on to build an ecosystem of applications, some long-tail, and some unexpected successes.
And arguably, x86 won for the same reason.
Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino.
Balmer said "Developers! developers! developers!" Visual Studio was not a major revenue driver for Microsoft; what was developed in it was.
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> Prototyping platforms have tiny markets, but lead to downstream sales. Many a company were brought down by more developer-friendly platforms ignoring the "tiny" userbase of people who want to do unconventional things.
Qualcomm doesn't even make small/cheap MCUs so they aren't going to win over that market by buying Arduino. Their first board post-acquisition is a mashup of a Linux SBC with an MCU devkit, and while the Linux SOC is from QCOM, the MCU is from ST Micro.
>Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino.
How do you know the 500 million sales is due to the Arduino ecosystem?
I used to work in embedded for 10+ years and in the 4 companies I worked at so far, none of the products ever featured AVR microcontrollers. The microcontroller of choice for production was always based on the feature/cost ratio for each application, never on the "is it part of the Arduino ecosystem?" question.
Tinkering with Arduino at home, and building products for mass production, have widely different considerations.